SIMPLIFYING RECOVERY FOR WINDOWS SYSTEMS AND EXCHANGE SERVERS

SIMPLIFYING RECOVERY FOR WINDOWS SYSTEMS AND EXCHANGE SERVERS

CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY... 3 A WIDE RANGE OF OPTIONS... 4 RAPID RECOVERY FOR WINDOWS SYSTEMS AND EXCHANGE SERVERS... 5 BACKUP FAST, RECOVER FASTER... 6 ABOUT STORAGECRAFT... 7

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Disaster recovery isn t easy. Having the right tools and plans in place can certainly make it a lot less painful. Riding out a once-in-a-century storm is much easier if you re well-fortified against the worst of the weather and you have enough supplies to get you through the early days of the storm s aftermath. But if the storm is a run-of-the-mill rain shower, all your preparation may seem like overkill. This is why you need flexibility in your disaster recovery planning. The problem may be as minor as an accidentally deleted file or as major as a flooded server room, but you need a way to address both. To the person who accidentally deleted a file, losing the document altogether would surely be a disaster. There s no question that a flooded server room could mean the difference between closing the doors of your business forever, or remaining open to help others through the worst. That s why you start with a broad reaching disaster recovery plan. You identify your critical systems and invest in protecting them. You purchase licenses of the best disaster recovery software you can afford, you take the time to set up everything exactly the way you need it, and you free up the bandwidth you need to replicate your backups to the cloud or some other offsite storage. This is good. You definitely need this kind of deep coverage in order to keep your business running, but in this world of IT supremacy, sometimes you need breadth, not depth. Sometimes you need to be prepared to move in quickly to protect a machine, or solve a problem, and you need your disaster recovery solution to be flexible enough to follow you wherever you go. If you re a managed service provider, this is even more crucial because of your responsibilities to your clients. Because you have less control over what happens at client sites, you need to be prepared for anything. In this product brief, we ll look at some of those situations that require breadth of disaster recovery, rather than depth, and then look at how StorageCraft ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO offers an even broader level of protection to address any disaster, great or small. 3

A WIDE RANGE OF OPTIONS Being able to get back to business quickly following a disaster requires a solution focused on rapid recovery. Sector- or image-based backups are designed for restoring IT environments swiftly, but not all of them do it easily. When catastrophic events happen, speed and simplicity aren t luxuries. They can mean the difference between success and failure on a number of levels. Having complete backup images of systems that can be restored to new systems in a few simple steps is essential. If the emergency isn t quite so catastrophic, you still need a ready-to-use solution that can provide quick recovery. You need a way to quickly access individual files and folders, if necessary, even if those files and folders are in a complicated database structure like Microsoft Exchange. Finding and recovering a missing PowerPoint presentation or an essential email message may not be a life-and-death scenario, but it can make a huge difference for one of your clients the difference in making a sale or keeping a job. Another important consideration is the footprint you overlay into your IT infrastructure with the disaster recovery solution you choose. For day-to-day backup, you want a disaster recovery solution that can provide onsite and offsite recovery. That solution should be set up in a way that provides for ongoing, continuous backup, but doesn t need to be managed constantly. But for some situations, a far-reaching backup and recovery solution is more than you need. In fact, it s more than you want. There are times when you need to back up one or more machines that you don t have licenses for. Or maybe you have a new client and you want to get them covered quickly while you figure out the best way to get their castle set up. Some machines simply aren t worth the trouble or cost to maintain, but they may house legacy information or software that can t be lost. You don t want to go through the hassle (or cost) of paying for a license and installing a full blown disaster recovery solution on a machine like that, but what do you do about the data? What if you re dealing with a complicated Exchange database, but you only need to recover one email message or one mailbox? Do you want to go through the time and stress of recovering the entire database for just one message? Another consideration is that some systems are fragile. Introducing new software into a computing environment could cause untold headaches, at best, or create a disaster all its own, at worst. Sometimes you need a tool at your disposal that can protect a system and all of the data on it, without adding new problems with system administration. Or, maybe you re like many solution providers. You have clients with a variety of machines, both physical and virtual, from several different manufacturers. You want to transfer data around, but the differences in machine type make it challenging. In fact, any migration is a challenge, regardless of the kind of machine you re on. These are just some examples of the kinds of situations you run into that require a different kind of disaster recovery solution. It needs to be robust enough to provide rock solid backups and easy recoveries, but it also needs to be flexible enough to handle those situations that don t fit inside the box. 4

RAPID RECOVERY FOR WINDOWS SYSTEMS AND EXCHANGE SERVERS StorageCraft ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO is the solution you need to protect Windows systems and Exchange servers. With ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO, you can back up Windows servers quickly and easily, and recover rapidly in the event of a disaster. Plus, it includes StorageCraft Granular Recovery for Exchange, so you can quickly recover email messages and entire mailboxes from Exchange servers without a hitch. ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO provides you with unlimited disaster recovery, data protection, and system migration for every Windows system in your IT environment, without installing any software. In addition to protection for all of your Windows systems, ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO gives you unlimited granular recovery of email messages and mailboxes for every Exchange server you support. With ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO, you can back up an unlimited number of servers and workstations. This means that it is the same cost for you to backup and restore five servers as it is for you to backup and restore 500 or 5,000. Think about how easy and cost effective it will be to migrate a client s office from physical to virtual systems. Because it also includes StorageCraft Granular Recovery for Exchange, you can recover individual or multiple mailboxes from Exchange Database (EDB) files quickly and easily. The easy-to-use interface allows you to recover mailboxes, messages, or attachments from an Exchange backup to a production Exchange server or PST file. This award-winning, best-in-class technology also allows you to search mailboxes and email messages based on criteria you specify directly from an EDB file. Search your Exchange database for specific keywords, or use the Advanced Search option to search based on message dates, senders, recipients, or subject matter. Licensing for ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO is subscription-based, so you pay to use the software for a specific amount of time. You can buy a subscription license for two weeks, one month, three months, or one year. During this time, you can back up, copy, clone, or restore an unlimited amount of systems. ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO includes StorageCraft Hardware Independent Restore technology which makes restoring to new hardware or a virtual environment fast and easy. Recover your backup image to new hardware (bare metal recovery), to different hardware, and/or to a wide range of supported hypervisors. You have plenty of options to choose from when restoring an entire system from a backup image. ShadowProtect IT Edition allows you to recover rapidly because there are no extra steps for recovery. After repairing your server, you restore your ShadowProtect backup image and you re ready to go the server operating system, applications, services, and data are all contained in the backup image file. 6

BACKUP FAST, RECOVER FASTER StorageCraft ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO gives you the wide range of options you need to recover quickly. ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO eliminates backup windows and lengthy recovery processes. Part of the StorageCraft Recover-Ability Solution, ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO creates full backups immediately without installing software on your production server. So there is no impact on business performance and everything including your operating system, applications, and data are protected. ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO takes disaster recovery to the next level by allowing you to back up and restore an unlimited number of systems. With the ability to quickly recover to multiple environments, ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO makes migrating each and every one of your servers from physical to virtual environments a snap, dramatically reducing the amount of time and resources required to complete your migration projects. Plus, ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO includes technology that provides you with granular recovery of Exchange server databases, as well as file and folder recovery on Windows systems. Every minute you lose in recovery time is income and productivity lost. Minimize recovery time and you maximize your profits. For additional information about ShadowProtect IT Edition PRO, please visit: www.storagecraft.com/shadowitpro. 7

ABOUT STORAGECRAFT At StorageCraft, the goal of complete disaster recovery drives everything we do. Our StorageCraft Recover- Ability solution is an end-to-end, best-in-class backup and disaster recovery solution that is both fast and reliable. STORAGECRAFT RECOVER-ABILITY It starts with a good backup. Our award-winning StorageCraft ShadowProtect takes complete, pristine images of your machines, including all your operating systems, applications, services, and settings. It then records changes at the sector level, so you always have an up-to-date copy of every machine in your IT environment, whether it s a critical server or an employee laptop, physical or virtual. We even work with specialized database servers, like SQL, SharePoint, or Exchange. You can get granular recovery in Exchange with ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange. You have complete control over the frequency of your backups and you can set rules for consolidation and retention to manage your precious storage space using StorageCraft ImageManager. Plus, with StorageCraft ShadowControl CMD you can monitor the machines in your backup environment from a single interface and get alerts when a machine is running out of space, when a backup doesn t happen, or when any of a variety of conditions you specify is met. We also give you tools to test your backups using StorageCraft VirtualBoot and StorageCraft Image- Ready technologies, which gives you confidence that your data is safe and that a disaster won t shut you down or hold you up. Then, we make it easy to replicate your backup images offsite to a StorageCraft Cloud Services site or to your own offsite location so you can always have your data close when you need it and at a good safe distance when a disaster comes. When it does, you can launch your backups as virtual machines with VirtualBoot or mount them as drives for complete, granular access to your data. Or you can pre-stage the recovery of a local backup image in a virtual machine with our patented CONTACT US StorageCraft Technology Corporation 11850 S. Election Road, Ste. 100 Draper, Utah 84020 USA Phone: 801.545.4700 Fax: 801.545.4705 www.storagecraft.com contactus@storagecraft.com StorageCraft HeadStart Restore technology, so if your main server blows up, you can be up and running in minutes. You can even virtualize your data offsite in our cloud so even Mother Nature can t keep you down. Then, you can rebuild your infrastructure and recover to all kinds of machines, physical or virtual, using our StorageCraft Hardware Independent Restore technology or ShadowProtect IT Edition. You can t be sure what kind of disaster will strike you next, but with the StorageCraft Recover-Ability solution, you can be sure it doesn t matter. You ll be just fine. Copyright 2013 StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All rights reserved. This publication is for informational purposes only. STORAGECRAFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, IN THIS PUBLICATION. StorageCraft, ShadowProtect, ShadowControl, intelligentftp, ShadowStream, ShadowCloud, and HeadStart Restore names and logos are registered trademarks and ImageReady, CMD, VirtualBoot, Hardware Independent Restore, and Recover-Ability names and logos are trademarks of StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 8